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tions and did their duty in spite of the deception and violence practised against them.

A central fact of the above narrative is that the nations engaged in commerce at Canton were not recognised by China as her equals. They, indeed, looked down upon her in turn with loftier disdain than they were ever required to brook at her hands. But whereas their contempt for her civilisation and her power could only be displayed by acts of violence which helped to confirm her estimate of their rude inferiority, she, on her side, was in a position to hold them at arm's length, to refuse all communication with them except through the medium of a limited body of her own merchants whom she held responsible for their conduct, and to insist that in addressing her officials they should not only rely on the intervention of these merchants, but should also employ the phraseology of petitioners, just as Chinese subjects were required to do. Such relations, though liable to frequent disturbance, were probably the best possible under the circumstances. But their uninterrupted maintenance plainly depended on the absence of any official element on the foreign side. Whenever a British man-of-war appeared upon the scene, her officers' refusal to adopt a subservient attitude created trouble seldom settled without an interchange of cannon-balls. Hence when, in 1834, the British Government decided not to renew the charter of the East India Company, and when, in consequence of that decision, the purely commercial